Your History with Me

Your History with Me

The Films of Penny Siopis

  • Author: Nuttall, Sarah
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • Serie: Theory in Forms
  • ISBN: 9781478026198
  • eISBN Pdf: 9781478059417
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2024
  • Month: September
  • Pages: 504
  • Language: English
Penny Siopis is internationally acclaimed for her pathbreaking paintings and installations. Your History with Me is a comprehensive study of her short films, which have put her at the front ranks of contemporary artist-filmmakers. Siopis uses found footage to create short video essays that function as densely encrypted accounts of historical time and memory that touch on the cryptic and visceral elements of gender and power. The critics, scholars, curators, artists, and filmmakers in this volume examine her films in relation to subjects ranging from the history of Greeks in South Africa, trauma and cultural memory, and her relationship with the French New Wave to her feminist-inflected articulations of form and content and how her films comment on apartheid. They also highlight her global South perspective to articulate a mode of filmmaking highly responsive to histories of violence, displacement, and migration as well as pleasure, joy, and renewal. The essays, which are paired with vivid stills from Siopis’s films throughout, collectively widen the understanding of Siopis’s oeuvre. Opening new vocabularies of thought for engaging with her films, this volume outlines how her work remakes the possibilities of film as a mode of experimentation and intervention.

Contributors. John Akomfrah, Sinazo Chiya, Mark Gevisser, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Katerina Gregos, Brenda Hollweg, William Kentridge, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Griselda Pollock, Laura Rascaroli, Zineb Sedira, Penny Siopis, Hedley Twidle, Zoé Whitley
  • Cover
  • Contents / Films
  • Contents / Texts
  • Introduction Your History with Me / Sarah Nuttal
  • 1. It Will Always Be You / William Kentridge
  • 2. Can You Write a History? / Laura Rascaroli
  • 3. Communing with Communion / Griselda Pollock
  • 4. Encounters with the Concentrationary / Brenda Hollweg
  • 5. Hellenic Histories / Katerina Gregos
  • 6. The Turning Liquid of the Real / Achille Mbembe
  • 7. The Tapeworm Writes Back! / Mark Gevisser
  • 8. Impossible Form / John Akomfrah, Zineb Sedira and Penny Siopis
  • 9. Anybody Can / Hedley Twidle
  • 10. Tentacular Narration / Zoé Whitley
  • 11. Angry Witnessing, Monstrous Play / Pumla Dineo Gqola
  • 12. Kinetic Worlds / Sinazo Chiya
  • 13. Contagion / Sarah Nuttall
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes and Additional References
  • Contributors
  • Artist Biography
    • Filmography
    • Institutional collections
    • Exhibitions and screenings
    • Selected texts
  • Index
    • A
    • B
    • C
    • D
    • E
    • F
    • G
    • H
    • I
    • K
    • L
    • M
    • N
    • O
    • P
    • Q
    • R
    • S
    • T
    • U
    • V
    • W
    • Y
    • Z

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